Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

SPIRITS OF SALT:

A TALE OF THE CORAL HEART

JEFFREY FORD

THE SAGA OF Ismet Toler can only be told in pieces. Like a victim of his battle craft transformed to red coral by a nick from his infamous blade only to be shattered with a well-placed kick and strewn in a thousand shards, the swordsman’s own life story is scattered across the valley of the known world and so buried in half-truth and legend that a scholar of the Coral Heart, such as myself, must possess the patience and devotion of a saint. It’s a wonder I’ve not yet succumbed to the hot air of the yarn spinners of inns and royal courts. Oh, they have wonderful tales to tell—fanciful, heroic, daunting adventures—but their meager imaginations could never match the truth of what actually transpired.

Many of them will recount for you, as if they were there, the Coral Heart’s battle on the island of Saevisha, against the cyclopean ogre, Rotnak, tall as a watchtower and ever ravenous for human flesh. They’ll supply the details, no doubt—the whistling wind from the swing of the giant’s club, the tremble of the earth in the wake of his monstrous stride, Toler’s thrust to that single eye and the whole massive body crackling into a weight of red coral the size of a merchant ship. I hate to disabuse you, but the incident never happened. Please, an ogre? Remember we live in the world, dear reader, not a children’s bedtime story.

One of the aspects of Toler’s life most abused by these fabrications is the story of his upbringing in the Sussuro Mountains. Yes, they manage to capture well enough the location and the fact that he lived out his childhood in a cave in the side of a cliff—common knowledge—but that’s about the extent of any accuracy. All of these tale tellers have him raised by a hermit, who taught him the art of swordsmanship. The old man was a master of the blade, a fallen knight who had fled the world for a life of contemplation. And even some of this is truth, because Toler was raised by a hermit. The difference between legend and truth, though, is that the hermit was a woman—an assassin who had spent half her life killing for the Alliance of the Back of the Hand, a clandestine society of the very wealthiest of aristocrats who pulled the strings of commerce and manipulated the fate of the powerless.

She was known, or more her work was known, under the alias, -I-. Even those in the secret council of the Alliance, those who sent her on her missions, had never seen her face. What they knew was her black cloak, her silk boots, the speed and grace of her sword. And they knew her mask, a blank white shell with two small circular eye holes and a small circle for a mouth. She killed swiftly, simply and accurately and moved like an eel through a sunken pasture in the escape. Most of her victims practiced sorcery. The Alliance had secretly declared war on all magic, fearing its promise of hope to the powerless. In -I-’s years of killing, her prey had thrown spells at her, frightening illusions, distracting dreams, creatures of the imagination. She trusted in her sword, her darts, her leather club, and dagger. Once she parried with an enchanted hog, wielding a sword. Once she wrestled with an angel in the heat of the afternoon. She kept her focus as sharp as the blade, able to cut through illusion, sharper than magic.

In the summer of her 40th year, she was sent on a mission to kill a witch, the crone of Aer, who lived on the outskirts of the city of Camiar. There, in a small cottage, she kept a vast flower garden from which she drew her sorcery. The warm sun and cloudless blue skies did their best to distract the assassin as she rode out of the city to the edge of the Forest of Sans. Along the way, she repeatedly caught herself daydreaming. When she neared the spot where the council had told her she’d find the witches’ cottage, she slipped off her horse and sent it silently away to graze in the pasture of tall grass. Moving against the breeze, she crept amid six foot stalks, swarming with yellow butterflies. Some small pest stung her on the back of the neck but she ignored the distraction. At the edge of the pasture, with the place finally in sight, she drew her sword.

She found the door of the cottage wide open and a black cat sitting on the top of three short steps. It never so much as cast a glance her way. Stepping through into the cool shadows of the cottage, she felt the adrenalin pulse and crouched into the fighting stance known as the fly trap. Her eyes immediately adjusted and she noted the basket of fruit on the table, the collections of animal skulls and cleaved rocks, displaying green and purple crystals at their centers. Melted candles and crudely fashioned furniture made from tree branches. Crystals hung by twine in the place’s one window, blown glass bottles on the sill held nasturtiums. -I- moved cautiously from one room to the next till she’d searched all three. Then from the kitchen, through a back door, she let herself into the garden.

The aroma of the blossoms was relaxing. She felt the muscles in her sword arm slacken and released a sigh she’d not intended, which she knew was enough of a slip to get her killed. The garden had a fountain and diverging paths lined with egg-like stones, shining in the summer sun and radiating warmth through the soles of her boots. More butterflies and grasshoppers and thickets of flowers of all types and colors spilling onto the edges of the walk. Passing a shock of blue daffodils twice her height, she was startled by a figure, standing amid a bed of foxglove. Her blade instantly swept through the air, and stuck with a knock three inches in the neck of a wooden statue. Its eyes were sea shells, its heart a puffball. She pulled the sword free and spun around to see if anyone had heard. There was only a breeze and the sun in the sky.

-I- found her target further down the path, sitting in a wicker chair beneath an awning of huge, broad leaves. Beside the old woman there was a table on which sat a tea pot, two cups, a lit taper and a pipe. Upon noticing -I-, the witch smiled, and motioned for the assassin to join her. She pointed to the empty wicker chair across from hers. -I- was startled by the realization that she’d let herself be detected.

The witch pushed her grey hair behind her ears and said, “Come sit down. There’ll be plenty of time for killing later. And take that ridiculous mask off.”

Disarmed as she was, realizing that any chance of surprise was gone, she walked forward, sheathed her sword and sat down. “Did you hear me coming?” she asked.

“I smelled you two days off,” said the witch. “Sweet enough but somewhat musty. Please, dear, the mask.”

“Brave for a woman who’s about to die,” said -I-, unable to believe she was speaking to her prey. Until that moment, she’d never have conceived of the possibility. By every measure, it was bad form. Still, she removed her mask and set it on the table. The witch’s glance made her blush.

“Do you mean me or you?” asked the crone of Aer.

“You intend to kill me?” -I- went for her sword.

“Easy, dearest,” said the witch. “For someone who’s killed so often, you know little of death.”

-I- returned her sword and sat back. From her years of assessing her prey, her glance instantly registered the woman’s lined face and hunched form, noted her strange beauty—ugliness made a virtue—and the grace with which she poured a cup of tea.

“If I’d wanted you dead, I’d have sent a thought form servant with a silver rope to strangle you in your sleep two days ago,” said the witch. She pushed the steaming tea cup across the table.

-I- shook her head at the offering.

“Drink it.”

She reached for the tea cup at the same time she wondered which poison the old lady had used. Bringing it to her lips, -I-’s senses were enveloped with the aroma of the pasture, its steam misting her vision. She meant to ask herself what she was doing but felt it would have to wait until after she’d tasted the tea. It was soothing and made her body feel cool in the breeze of the hot day. Drinking in small sips, she quickly downed the cup while the witch packed a pipe with dried leaves from a possum hair pouch.

As -I- placed the empty cup back on the table, the witch handed her the smoldering pipe—a thin hollowed out tibia with a bowl carved to resemble the form of an owl.

“What was the tea? And what is this?” asked the assassin.

“The tea was clippings from the garden, stored underground through a frost, drying in sugar. The smoke is Simple Weed.”

“It makes you simple?”

“Does everything need to be complicated?”

-I- laughed and accepted the pipe and candle with which to spark it. She forsook caution, drew deeply, and woke in the middle of the night, the stars shining overhead. She sat up suddenly, confused, her joints aching from the cold ground she’d slept upon. She staggered to her feet and drew her sword only to find she was completely alone. The starlight was enough to show her she’d lain among the ruins of an old stone building, roof gone and walls three quarters shattered. Grass grew up around the fallen masonry and crickets sang.

She reached her free hand to the back of her neck and found the tiny dart she’d put off to an insect still lodged there. It was instantly clear that she’d been out cold since the moment she’d felt the sting amid the tall grass and all else had been a dream. She called for her horse and it approached from the pasture. Mounting it, she rode fiercely toward Camiar, and within the first mile realized the witch in the dream was her future-self. It was then she decided to assassinate all in the secret council of the Alliance of the Back of the Hand.

And she did just that. Five fat, miserable old men. She stalked them and dispatched them without remorse. Each of the four remaining after the first councilor was found, his head stuffed in his hind quarters, hired their own small army of body guards and assassins, but -I- cut through all of them. It was a time known to those in the know as the ‘Hemorrhage,’ for there was a great bleeding although none of the blood seeped into public view. She killed the councilors and their minions, quietly, secretly, each assassination merely a whisper. She killed the head of the Alliance, the so called ‘middle finger of the Back of the Hand,’ so exquisitely that it took him an hour to realize he was dead before dropping over. And when the last was opened like a mackerel to let the insides become the outside, she rode out of Camiar and lost herself in the Sussuro Mountains.

She ate what hermits eat, locust and honey, weeds and flowers, fruit and fish. She hunted with her sword, facing off against mountain goats, bears, wild cats, badgers. Those she assassinated for the Alliance rarely had a chance to fight back, but these creatures were cunning and fast and fought to the death every time. Her style of engagement became more calculated than ever, seeing that the fierceness in creatures was a mask of fear. While they pounced, she analyzed and then in the last instant struck with accuracy—one thrust of the blade to let the fear out.

Her dagger trimmed the hide from the meat, which she wrapped in an animal skin and dragged back to her cave. There she had fire and fresh clothes she stole on raids of Camiar’s clothes lines. At night she read her only book, The Consolation of the Constellations, by the light of a lantern that cast a silhouette of an ibis on the wall of the cave. When reading wouldn’t do, she worked through her imagination to create a thought form servant like the one mentioned by her dream witch.

When she finally climbed into her sleeping bag nestled upon willow branches, let the fire burn low, and closed her eyes, she always wondered who it was who’d cast the dart that day she’d gone to kill ‘the witch’. She wondered if there’d ever been such a sorceress as the crone of Aer or if the whole thing had been an ambush. Since she wasn’t killed, she believed that perhaps a larger spell had been cast that might strike a blow against the Alliance and remove her deadly art from the covert war between the powerful and the people. The longer she stayed away from Camiar, the more she considered that dart an act of kindness.

In spring of her second year in the mountains, while chasing down a stag, she followed the creature into a place she’d never been before. It led her down a canyon as wide as an alley to the floor of a gorge. There, things opened up to a vast mudflat shadowed by 300 foot vertical walls of granite. She looked up and saw the blue sky over the rim of the cliffs and the sight of it made her cold. In an instant, she felt that the place was haunted and she turned to flee. It was then that she noticed the bodies, lying here and there, dressed in finery, decomposing in the mud. They were badly broken, limbs in odd twisted positions, obviously having fallen from the cliffs.

Seeing the manner in which the corpses were dressed, she remembered from her days with the Alliance having heard of a place in the mountains where people were coaxed to commit suicide by leaping to their deaths. The natural setting of the gorge was staggeringly beautiful, and so the secret council gave some of their victims the choice—either -I- could come for them or they could willingly take the plunge at Churnington’s Gorge surrounded by nature and with a modicum of dignity. When she realized who the dead were, she rifled their pockets and took the mink coat of a recent arrival. Her fear of spirits was strong every second she delayed to pillage them, and eventually she left behind a string of pearls she easily could have had and ran, heart pounding, back through the narrow canyon.

That night, lying in the cave, the fire burning low, -I- remembered looking up to the cliffs and seeing that sliver of blue sky. With that image in mind, she had an idea that wealthy people about to jump might leave something behind for the world to remember them by. She daydreamed a large man in a violet suit, brandishing a cane, leaving behind a short stack of books before stepping over the side, and realized she would go there, to the top of the gorge, and see what treasures could be found.

The journey was arduous, the trail leading over a mountain and then a descent to the plateau that ended at Churnington’s. What she found at the edge of the cliff was a small boy, sitting, staring out at the afternoon sun. In his pocket, she found a note that read, “I am Ismet Toler.” She judged him to be three years old. When she leaned down to him and reached out her hand, he took it. “Come,” she said, and led him back to the cave where she raised him.

Little is known about Toler’s younger years. Although there are many opinions about what kind of mother -I- made for the boy, or what kinds of qualities he’d carried over from the poor soul who’d chosen to leap to his doom, there exists no proof for any of it. The only verifiable record from this time was a letter written by a sixteen year old Toler to himself about his training in swordsmanship. There were cadavers dragged from the gorge and strapped to the trunks of trees or hung by a rope from a branch—life-like dummies on which one could practice the precise arc and velocity necessary to slice the heel tendon of a large man. There was dance. There were acrobatics and contemplation. About sparring with -I-, he confessed to himself, he couldn’t conceive of victory.

The only other verifiable incident from Toler’s youth was related to me by Lady Etmisler, who had heard it from the Coral Heart, himself, at a banquet they’d both attended in the palace at Camiar. He told her that when he became masterful with the sword, -I- told him that he’d reached the second of three levels of development. She told him to leave the cave and go out in the world and ply his trade. He wanted to know when his new training would begin, and she told him, “In five years, you can return to me if by then you’ve renounced the sword. We can only continue if you forsake it.”

That night she told him the story of how she came to the mountains and discovered him on the ledge at Churnington’s Gorge. In the morning, he kissed her goodbye, and she told him that at the end of five years, she would send a thought form servant to him to ask if he’d renounced the sword and was returning. He nodded as he walked away, his sword upon his back. In the valley of the known world, he soon found employment as a bodyguard to a corrupt bishop who was often the target of assassination attempts. From there his reputation as a swordsman grew. He moved on to work as a mercenary and fought for the side that paid the most in any conflict, often changing sides in mid-battle for the promise of better. By his fourth year away from the mountains, Ismet Toler was a name to be reckoned with.

But as that fourth year drew to a close, after proving the effectiveness of his blade, he felt he’d had enough of slaughter. The disfigurement of his victims’ bodies, the blood and severed flesh, had become nauseating to him. It was all too much of the same gore, and he felt a need to move on to the next level. His diary from this time proves he was on the verge of renouncing the sword and returning to -I-. For the remaining months of the year, he decided to leave his position, training assassins for the Igridot royalty, and head for Camiar, where he would rent rooms, live off the spoils of his killing, and wait for -I-’s servant to appear.

In that brief space of days that he travelled north on the road to Camiar, Fate in all its bad timing and low humor, stepped in, and he somewhere, somehow, acquired the Coral Heart, the blade, whose magical properties would eventually make him a legend. Toler swore to never reveal how he came by it, and so this crucial juncture in the story is blank. I constantly comb the valley of the known world for clues to those few days he spent retreating along that road, and have found nothing. I could spin a fanciful tale, but instead, I merely direct you to where the trail of known fact resumes.

By the time Toler entered the city, he’d already turned to red coral a band of highwaymen who’d foolishly tried to rob him and take his horse. It was the trio of palace guard, though, who confronted him in the market place at Camiar and wound up red statues of their former selves that caused the trouble. He knew he would have to flee. Learning the feel of the sword, he was eager to use it, but he’d not yet mastered its extra weight, or reckoned the sharpness or balance to the point where he could defeat the entirety of the royal guard of the palace of Camiar. He left the city by night as door to door torchlight searches for him were being conducted. There had been witnesses.

Two days later, he arrived in a village, a hundred miles away, separated from Camiar by the Forest of Sans. He chose Twyse as his hideout as it was off the main trails that linked the palaces of the realm. If the snowy, sleepy place had any reputation it was as a home for hunters who stalked the forests that lay just beyond. The furs and skins of Twyse were renowned among the royalty, but its inhabitants cared little for news from outside its borders and would have cheered a tale of the demise of three of the royal guard of Camiar. Toler had stayed there once before and came to know the people as that rare stock who could mind their own business.

He paid handsomely for the use of a barn at the edge of the village with a fireplace and a loft to sleep in, and paid extra for the owner to keep his mouth shut. Then once the great wooden doors were secured, he unwrapped the Coral Heart, which he’d hidden beneath an extra cloak, and began a regimen of daily practice. His diary attests that every hour he felt his ability with the sword growing. As he wrote, ‘The weapon has a personality and if I’m not mistaken a will, which I am learning to merge with mine.’

At night, after a full day of training, Toler would go to The Sackful, the town’s one inn, sit in a dark corner, drinking honeycomb rye, and contemplate what he would tell -I-’s mysterious servant when it materialized. Only days earlier, he’d planned to renounce the sword, but now he meant to tell her through her messenger of the nature of the enchanted weapon and how it was changing him. He wanted to tell her that it took the art of the blade to a new level, one he wished to explore. He’d beg her for a reply in which she would tell him her thoughts about his decision.

The days passed in Twyse, overcast but with no visits from the royal guard or news of local manhunts. Toler continued his exercises and imaginary battles and now had begun to move around the entire expanse of the barn in a lunatic dance that made even him doubt his sanity at times. Still, it was exciting and he’d burst out laughing when the sword would show him something new. Now when he held the coral heart of the grip, he felt a pulsing in his palm that matched the beating of his heart. As Toler reminds us in a diary entry, all he wrote for that particular day—‘This sword has slain monsters.’

As his confidence grew through his daily practice, he became bolder at night as well, conversing and drinking with the people of the village at The Sackful. They told him of their hunting and he recounted some of his exploits as a mercenary, failing, of course, to mention his name. The moment that marked a monumental transition in the life of Ismet Toler was the night, before leaving for the inn, that he removed his old sword from its sheath and replaced it with the Coral Heart. From the moment it hung at his side, he felt a great sense of calm and a new shrewd reserve, an intuitive calculation.

That night he drank more than his fill and revealed too much about himself. Halfway into the evening, while the inn crowd was listening to a young girl sing a hunter’s hymn, he realized that all his new found energy and personality, his reserve was as a result of his yearning to use the sword again in a battle. The charm of practice had just about reached its limits and he was eager for the fray. To build the energy, he decided to hold off using the Coral Heart for another two weeks, and then if the occasion arose, or he were to coax one into happening, he would draw the weapon and turn the world red.

That night, soon after he’d made his decision to continue to lay low, the chatter of The Sackful died down for an instant and the patrons were able to hear a horse approaching on the frozen road. All eyes glanced at the door, including Toler’s. A moment passed and then a hooded figure strode in dressed warmly against the winter night—gloves and leggings, a thick cloak. The swordsman noticed first, of course, the stranger’s sword hilt, which appeared to be made of clear crystal. The man strode to the bar, and the inn crowd, out of a sense of rural politeness, tried to avert their glances. They were soon drawn back to the figure, though, when the inn keeper, after inquiring if the stranger would have a cup of holly beer, gasped aloud.

What he alone was seeing, all beheld a moment later, when the man who’d just arrived drew back his hood—a face and neck and even hair of a deep red hue. Toler went weak where he sat, realizing from the smooth, shiny consistency of that face, that the fellow was made of red coral. He wondered if this was one of his recent victims having chased him down for revenge. But there was nothing in the legend of he Coral Heart to suggest that its prey returned to life as breathing statues.

“I want whiskey,” said the stranger and although he looked to be made of polished coral his mouth moved pliantly and his lips slipped into a smile without cracking his face. He pulled off his gloves, and yes, his fingers and palms too were red coral and flexed easily, although when he set one down upon the bar there was a sound as if he’d dropped a rock. He lifted off his cloak and set it on a chair. None were prepared for a statue come to life.

Toler, like the rest of his Sackful compatriots couldn’t move, so stunned were they at the sight. “What manner of creature are you?” asked the innkeeper, backing away.

“My name is Thybault, and I, like you, am a man, of course.”

“How’d you come by that color?” asked one of the more brazen patrons, lifting the hatchet from a loop in his belt. “That’s the color of the devil.”

“The devil? You’re an idiot,” said Thybault.

The hunter with the axe stood, his weapon now firmly in his grip. “An idiot I may be,” he said, “but at least I know god never made a man out of red stone.” This said, two of his fellow hunters rose behind him.

“Coral,” said the red man.

Toler would later recount in his diary that it was at this moment that he realized the stranger had come for him. He cautiously moved his cloak up to cover the hilt of the Coral Heart. A tightness in his chest told him not to get involved in what was about to happen. The anticipation of battle in the room was palpable. The hunters slowly advanced toward Thybault, who turned to the innkeeper and said, “Where’s my drink?”

While he was looking away, they lunged. When they saw the speed with which he drew his sword, it was visible in their faces that they knew they’d made a mistake. The lead hunter raised the hatchet high, but the crystal sword had already punctured his throat, and in an eyeblink later, he disintegrated into salt that showered down into a pile on the wooden floor. There were screams of fear and wonder from the patrons. The two other hunters’ eyes were wide. The shock made them living statues as Thybault became a statue alive, spinning into a crouch and running one through, exploding him into salt. Then an upward motion and the crystal blade buried itself in the underside of the third man’s chin. Again, it rained salt onto which fell the empty garments.

The innkeeper put Thybault’s drink on the bar. There was silence as the coral man returned his glistening sword to its sheath and lifted his whiskey. The only one to move was a young woman who, getting to her knees, gathered in her apron the salt that had been the hunters. Toler was frightened and he hated the feeling. He’d trained for weeks to reach the condition he was in, and the first instance where he might have tried out the Coral Heart, fate threw at him an enemy who was a superior swordsman and made of red coral. He knew it could only be magic.

Thybault finished his drink and smashed the clay cup on the floor. He turned and stared out at the patrons cowered into the corners of the inn. The candles’ glow against his polished complexion set him in a bright red haze. He put on his left glove. “If anyone knows of a man, Ismet Toler, tell him I challenge him to a duel out in this latrine of a street tomorrow morning when the church bell chimes. Every day he doesn’t meet me, I’ll turn another three of you to salt. We’ll start with the children.” He put on his other glove, wrapped his cloak around him, lifted his hood, and was gone. In the silence that followed, they heard his horse, which must have been massive from the percussion of its hoof beats, moving away into the sound of the winter wind.

Someone cursed, and then the inn erupted into a den of chatter. Toler was so scared he could barely move. Still, he managed to stand and slowly make his way to the door. He didn’t want to run, which would, although they didn’t know his name, identify him as Ismet Toler. When he neared the entrance, he turned around and shuffled backward, a little at a time, until he was free of the place. The cold air helped him to think, and he realized that it wouldn’t be long before the people of Twyse gave him up to the crystal sword. As he ran toward the barn, he made the decision to ride out that night, take to the forest and escape.

In his diary entry that was made apparently just before setting out on horseback, he wrote, ‘Something powerful is after me. I’m running away.’ Then he fled into the night forest, stopping and listening every now and then to make sure Thybault and his giant horse weren’t following. There was no moon and the sky was overcast. Toler stayed off the trails and that made the journey slow and difficult. The temperature dropped well below freezing and before he was even an hour into his escape, it began to snow. Still, he kept moving forward, but for every few yards he’d cover the white wind pushed harder against him. By the end of another hour, he was sure he’d freeze—a statue in a saddle.

An hour further on and the snow was so blinding, he was sure they’d been traveling in circles for the last five miles. His hands were so cold, he was losing his grip on the reins; his face was all but numb. The incessant pummeling of his eyes by the small hard flakes made him ride with them closed, and what he saw behind the lids was more snow driving down within his mind. In his confusion he mistook the sound of the wind for that of a children’s choir, and it made him recall Thybault threatening, “We’ll start with the children.” The only thought that stayed fixed in his mind was that he was a coward.

It came to him at one point in the storm that the horse was no longer moving. He looked up into the squall to see what had happened and felt a pair of hands grasp his arm. Their touch was so wonderfully warm. He squinted against the snow and saw a small form in a black cloak standing beside his horse, reaching up to him. “Come with me,” said a female voice. Ice cracked off him as he climbed down. He turned back to the animal to see if it was still alive. “Don’t worry, your mount will be fine.” Somehow he heard her voice clearly beneath the howl of the wind. She pulled him gently by the arm and he followed.

A few minutes later they entered a cottage built beneath giant pines whose boughs blocked some of the blizzard. He groaned slightly when he heard the door close behind him and felt the warmth of a fire. “You saved me,” he said finally, turning to his host. The young woman had already removed her cloak and was hanging it on a peg near the door. When she looked up and smiled, he knew he’d seen her before. “Where do I know you from?” he asked, his hand dropping to the coral hilt.

“I was at the inn tonight when the red man came,” she said.

“Ahh,” said Toler. “I saw you gather up the remains of the hunters he, what would you call it, killed?”

“Yes.”

“How did you find me in the storm? How did you know I was out there?”

“Do you know who I am?” she said.

Toler began to sweat. He shook his head and gripped his sword. “Are you my mother’s servant?”

The young woman laughed. “Perish the thought. I’m the crone of Aer.”

“The crone of Aer?” said Toler, knowing he’d heard the title before. “Where’s Aer?”

“At the end of the valley of the known world,” she said.

“You don’t look like a crone,” he told her.

“To each her crone,” she said.

“And so I’m to assume you sent this hellish swordsman after me? Made him of coral so as to cancel the magic of my weapon?”

“That monstrosity isn’t mine,” she said. “I want to help you defeat it.”

“There’s not going to be a battle,” said Toler. “I’m fleeing for my life. I’m not prepared to meet such an opponent.”

“Because he has an advantage like the one your sword, in any other duel, would give to you?”

“Precisely,” he said.

“You will fight him,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“I’ve made you something that will help.” She walked past him and the glow of the fireplace into the shadows of the cottage.

Toler sweated profusely; the so recently welcomed warmth was now oppressive. He didn’t trust anything. A sword that turns opponents to coral, a red coral man with a crystal sword that turns opponents to salt, and a witch in a cottage in the middle of a blizzard. “Wake up,” he whispered to himself, and then the crone of Aer returned, holding a large goose egg out toward him. He took a step back from this new strangeness.

“This egg holds your salvation in a duel with Thybault. Do you remember the salt I gathered at the inn?”

“Yes.”

“I mixed it with green vitriol and derived the spirits of salt. They’re here in the egg. Merely crack this in the face of Thybault and you will have gained back the advantage.”

“What will happen?”

“The spirits will be released.”

“I’m going back into the storm,” he told her. “I don’t trust you. I remember the story my mother told me about you.”

“Your mother, who was sent to assassinate me? That demon we saw at the inn tonight, that wasn’t my doing.”

Toler moved toward the door. His hand touched the knob and he felt a sudden sting at the back of his neck. He tottered for a spell and then fell into the heat of the cottage. The crone spoke directly into his ear. “It’s your mother’s servant.”

He woke in the street, the Coral Heart drawn and in his hand, a crowd surrounding him. He heard the church bells and in a second realized he was back in Twyse. He pulled himself up off the frozen mud and the crowd retreated a few steps. Freezing to the point of shivering and totally confused, he turned to look for an escape from the people, and saw Thybault charging, the crystal blade above his head. He wore no shirt or shoes, the cold meant nothing to him.

Toler crouched and brought his weapon up to block the downward chop of the crystal blade. The crystal clanged off the metal of his weapon, hard as blade steel. He absorbed the blow and rolled away, two somersaults backward and then into a standing position. As he lifted the Coral Heart in defense, he felt the beat of the pulse in his palm. His heart regulated it and regulated the sword. The training he’d done was paying off. Thybault came after him, swinging wildly, massively, as if to cut Toler in half. The red man’s blade caught a bystander on the earlobe and made her a cloud of salt. The sight of it distracted the Coral Heart and it was everything he could do to gather in his wonder and counter a thrust of the crystal death.

The duel became fierce, a crazy clash of swords amid the thronging crowd. The pair moved around the street, attacking and defending. At one point, Toler could have sworn that he’d been cut by Thybault. In fact he stopped to look along his side where his shirt was ripped.

“Don’t you get it,” said the red man. “You’ll know when I cut you because you’ll be a pile of salt.” With this, Toler’s opponent punched him in the mouth, those polished coral knuckles like a hammer, and sent him stumbling backward into the crowd. Afraid to be caught by an errant blade from the red man, the crowd retreated, and let their defender fall on his back in the street.

Again, Thybault advanced, this time more deliberately, as if confident he could finish the duel at will. Someone behind Toler helped him to his feet. As he regained his stance, he felt something smooth slip into his free hand. It could have been a stone by its size but it lacked the weight. He cantered to the left and began circling Thybault. The red man swung, every time just a second behind the moving target. When Toler stopped abruptly, Thybault kept turning and swinging, and this gave the Coral Heart a chance to look down at the object he held; the crone’s goose egg.

He got in two good slashes to the red man’s neck, but his blade had little effect upon the coral. Tiny slivers chipped away, leaving barely visible creases. One thing he was sure of was that the longer he could stay alive the better his chances were.

The red man, carrying and swinging the crushing weight of red coral arms, was growing winded. He redoubled his efforts to finish off Toler and came with a barrage of lunges and half fades that pressed the youth back nearly to the wall of the inn. Thybault then executed an empty fade and instead of retreating, lunged with his foot drawn up. He caught Toler in the chest with a kick and slammed him against the wall, knocking the air out of him. He slid down to a sitting position. The Coral Heart had sprung free from Toler’s grasp, and the crystal sword advanced, slashing the air.

Thybault stood now above his prey, leering down. The crowd cheered, shifting allegiance upon seeing that Toler was doomed and fearing reprisals from the apparent victor for having initially cheered against him. The red man lifted the gleaming blade into the air for the final blow, and it was here that Toler threw the egg that was still in his hand. It hit his opponent in the face and cracked. Something wet inside spilled across the coral man’s visage. He laughed at Toler’s desperate attempt at defense, and the crowd joined him.

Then Thybault’s face began to smoke and fizz and a chunk of his chin slid off. The coral man’s laughter turned to screams, and the crowd, not knowing how to react, screamed as well. Toler gathered his wits and rolled to where the Coral Heart lay. As he sprang up with his weapon in his grip, Thybault dropped the crystal sword and clawed at his face, more slivers and chunks bubbling pink and fizzing away, coming loose. The Coral Heart didn’t rely on the magical properties of his sword but just its strong steel blade, and with a mighty arcing swing, the air singing against the blood groove, he took off his opponents already rotted head. It fell on the ground smoking. A moment later the massive weight of the coral body tipped over and smashed to pieces in the frozen street. The crowd cheered for Toler.

Toler stared at the smoldering face and, in awe, noticed the lips moving. He got down on his knees and put his ear to them. To his astonishment, the sound that came forth was his mother’s, -I-’s, voice. “You have now ascended to the second level,” she said. “I thought I was to renounce the sword,” whispered Toler. “Don’t be a fool,” were her last words. Then the crowd swarmed him and took him on their shoulders into the inn to celebrate his victory.

Late that night, when he returned to the barn to prepare his things for a journey back to Camiar in the morning, the crone of Aer was waiting for him. She stepped out of the shadows and her sudden presence made him draw the Coral Heart.

“I noticed Thybault’s crystal sword disappeared soon after the duel,” he said to her.

“I took it and hid it away. No one will find it. You now have no equal.”

“I don’t understand my mother’s creation.”

“She was testing you. She may live in a cave in the mountains, but in her heart she’ll always be an assassin.”

“But didn’t you put a spell on her and change her?”

“That was all just a dream she had, twice deluding herself. You can create incredible, deadly, thought form servants and raise a child while surviving in the mountains, but you can’t change what’s in your heart.”

“So you helped me because she once intended to kill you?”

“From what I saw today,” said the crone, “it looks like she intended to kill you as well.”

“You said no one else knows where the crystal sword is?” asked Toler.

It was only hours after he’d left the village, riding on a main trail through the Forest of Sans, that the owner of the barn Toler had stayed in found the red coral statue of a young woman with long hair. The man was surprised and perplexed by it for a few years until news of the hard red slaughter reached even Twyse. Upon learning of the Coral Heart, he told his daughter how the ancients once believed that the planet Mars was made of red coral.